Category: issues

New York’s Symphony Space is “like a gawky teenager grown to chic adulthood: It has all the spiffy trappings of a modern arts center, but under the makeup and grown-up clothes, a winningly goofy adolescent — or maybe an Upper West Side oddball — still lurks.”

A scandal is brewing over a Canadian government plan to fund summer festivals. Which festivals? A memo has been discovered asking members of parliament of the ruling Conservative Party to recommend festivals from their districts…

Artists and scientists are increasingly getting together to find points of collaboration. “Engineers and artists, robotics specialists and printmakers, they’ve come to listen and talk about the growing overlap between new technologies and art. Their mailing list has 150 names on it. When they meet, it’s a Collision Collective Collusion.”

“While Hollywood has not stopped making films appealing to women and girls … women here worry that the future will not be so bright. They are nervous about the disappearance of many of the movie world’s most visible female power brokers and concerned that a box office dominated by seemingly male-oriented action films like ‘300’ means less attention for movies that have obvious appeal to female audiences, 51 percent of moviegoers.”

“Just as we as a people are free to engage in objectionable speech — and to turn away from it if we are offended — hip-hop’s critics are free to debate, coax, bully, even legislate that speech. … But the bottom line in any commercial enterprise is what the market will bear. And here, a weariness with the mind-numbingly repetitive, casually hateful emphasis on violence, misogyny, homophobia, and commercialism may be doing the necessary corrective work.”

“In a rare move, the Smithsonian is going to charge admission for part of a new permanent exhibition called ‘Butterflies and Plants: Partners in Evolution.’ Admission to the Smithsonian’s Washington museums has always been free, and the legislation and wills creating four of its museums… specifically ban admission fees. But in recent years some lawmakers have been pushing Smithsonian officials to find new ways of meeting expenses.”

“You’re invited to join in a round of high-stakes poker, but find yourself in a different game entirely – say, three-card monte – with the outcome determined by the dealer. That’s a crude analogy for what many arts organizations, theatre companies, galleries and publishers say they experienced with a special multimillion-dollar funding program run by the Canada Council for the Arts.”

Controversies tend to spiral in directions that few would have anticipated, so it probably shouldn’t be a big surprise that the dust-up over racist comments by radio shock jock Don Imus turned quickly into a referendum on the use of similar words in hip-hop music. “Like MySpace users and politicians and reality-television stars and, yes, talk-radio hosts, rappers are trying to negotiate a culture in which the boundaries of public and private space keep changing, along with the multiplying standards that govern them.”

Michael Billington says that the UK’s proposed cuts to cultural subsidies in order to meet the high cost of staging the 2012 Olympic Games are stunningly wrongheaded. “The overall effect is dismal. It leaves the impression that the government is ready to rob Peter to pay future Pauls. Also that it doesn’t understand that artists, like athletes, need grassroots encouragement to achieve national standards.”

“Two years ago, school officials in Grand Marais, Minn., were on the defensive for suspending, and calling the police about, a student who had written a violent fantasy about killing a teacher. The student, David Riehm, ended up in a locked psychiatric unit for three nights. Then his family sued. … But in the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings, school officials say they’re more certain than ever that they did the right thing.”